C. Whelan | Post Primary | Science
I wasn’t very good at giving homework in the past, nor was I good at correcting it. I was just giving homework as per our school homework policy. I wasn’t thinking about it, or how it would help my students. I was just giving homework thinking that any type of homework is always helpful. I even think at one stage I didn’t believe in homework, with no grounds for justification. I did struggle with homework as a student myself. I could never tie it in with what we were doing in class. Maths homework was always a huge problem, I could understand the example but the questions that followed were always too difficult for me. You would think that my experience with homework as a pupil would also help me in my early years as a teacher. I’ve seen a few debates online between teachers about homework, for and against. Here is my view, for what it is worth.
What type of homework did I give a few years ago? I am guilty of the “do questions 1 to 15 page 32” homework. Realistically, students were just moving information from one place to another and not really thinking hard about what they were doing. Another classic was “draw out the labelled diagram of the digestive system.” Again, not very difficult and all the students had to do was to copy the diagram out. I’m not really knocking this type of homework, I’m sure some students found it useful. What I’m trying to say is, there are better things that students can do for homework. I will always return to the following quote from Daniel Willingham:
“Memory is the residue of thought.”
Why do I keep returning to this quote? Well, as teachers, we need our students to be thinking hard about what they are doing. There probably wasn’t too much thinking going on with the two examples of homework from above. Also, the teacher (me) giving the homework, wasn’t thinking too much about it either.
Students need to retrieve information from their long-term memory into their short-term memory on a regular basis. When you look at the amount of theory that a Leaving Certificate student needs to learn for just one subject, then you must look at how homework should be an integral part of their learning. For example, I teach Agricultural Science, the never-ending course. It consists of four strands and if I take Strand 2 (Soil), I have a question bank of about 300 core questions. That is a quarter of the course. I just don’t have the time to ask those questions twice, let alone three or four times. This is where homework comes in. Nowadays there are plenty of online platforms to choose from that can help. I won’t go into which one is better, but I use Carousel Learning. The reason I use it is because it was the first one that I tried out during Lockdown 1 and it still, for me, is the best way to implement homework. Carousel Learning was co-created by Adam Boxer (Who made the excel file Retrieval Roulette) and all of what I have said so far and what I am about to say comes from a recent webinar about retrieval practice, delivered by Adam.
What does my homework look like now?
I can upload my Strand 2 question bank to Carousel Learning and I have already set up my students with a code to access their homework. I give each one of my classes two Carousel quizzes a week. Each quiz consists of 10 to 15 carefully selected core questions based on what we are doing in class with a few core questions from a previous topic (for spaced practice). When you create a quiz, Carousel creates a link that you can paste into whatever platform your school uses, Teams for example. When the students click the link, they are brought to the site and enter their personal code. They start the quiz with retrieval practice, the platform provides digital flash cards for either all of the questions in the bank or only the questions on the quiz. When they are ready, they take the quiz. They then correct the quiz themselves. They can also do the quiz again if they want. There is a serious amount of retrieval practice going on at this stage. As a teacher, I can go in after the homework deadline and quickly check their answers to make sure that they have done it properly. Here is the key moment in all of this. As I have mentioned in other blogs, I have a "do now" ready for my students when they enter my laboratory for class. The do now is made up of the questions that they had for homework. By doing this, I make homework part of my lesson. I recently got Craig Barton’s new book ‘Tips for Teachers’ and he has a wonderful chapter on homework based on his conversations with Adam.
‘If you want students to take homework seriously, ensure it plays an integral role in your lessons.’
Craig Barton
Adding to this, Craig goes on to suggest that we should address homework at the start of a lesson and use the class time to look at homework questions that caused problems for students. We can also use class time to improve a piece of homework and showcase excellent pieces of homework.
I know where I stand with homework, it is an essential part of my students learning. I would be very careful about promoting an end to it. If we use it properly, it can make a huge difference for all students. Overall, I see the positive impact that this type of homework has. I’ll also leave you with one more quote from Craig’s book:
‘The single most important factor to increase the chance of students taking homework seriously is to ensure that it feeds into lessons.’